The StartX Files: Seeing Linux Without Sight

Twenty Feet and a World Away

February 27, 2001

By
Brian Proffitt

When I was a young lad--actually a scrawny little punk who would
mouth off for any reason whatsoever--I would travel with my mother
down to the Gulf Coast of Florida to spend the summer with my
grandparents. These were essentially two-day trips, since there was
little chance a single mother and her son were going to drive straight
through from northern Indiana to southern Florida.

Invariably, our route would take us down I-75 through Chattanooga,
Atlanta, and Tampa. One summer, after an uncle had moved to Memphis,
we opted to saunter over and visit him, and came up north through
Alabama. Which is how I found myself at the age of 15 in Tuscumbia,
Alabama, trying to find the birthplace of Helen Keller.

I had read The Miracle Worker in school, of course. I was no expert
on Helen Keller, but I knew the basic story: struck blind and deaf at
the age of 19 months, Keller grew up to be a spoiled, wild child with
little desire to communicate. After a meeting with Alexander Graham
Bell, Keller's parents were introduced to teacher Anne Sullivan, who
came to live with the six-year old and her family in Tuscumbia.

It was soon apparent to Sullivan that the Keller family, while
well-meaning, indulged Helen far too much. Sullivan asked for
permission to move into the cook's house, isolating Helen away from
her family so they could get down to business. Soon after, Sullivan
managed to get across the power of communication using the now-famous
demonstration of spelling w-a-t-e-r on Keller's hands while immersing
those hands in the flow of the running well pump.

It is a story many of us are familiar with, but it bears a review,
because after reading that story and seeing the reality, I was struck
with a very startling realization. When you read about that incident,
you assume that the cook's house was fairly far away from the main
house--something like four or five hundred yards or so. How else would
Helen Keller be kept from her family?

But when you see the house for yourself, you find out that the two
buildings are less than 20 feet apart. Students of history would
realize this fact, since cook's houses were the working kitchens for
many middle- to upper-class homes. They couldn't be that far
away. In the book, it sounds as if Sullivan has transported her
student to another world. But it was only 20 feet, with the famous
well in-between the main house and the cook's house.

And it hit me, this scrawny little punk sweating in the Alabama
sun, right there and then: the magnitude of what being blind must be
like. It came all at once, and changed one of my perceptions
forever. I cannot claim full knowledge of being without sight, of
course--any sighted person who says that is an arrogant ass. But for
one moment, standing by a hand-pumped well, I had a glimpse of what it
must be like to be 20 feet and a world away.